Exclusive: What Y Combinator partner Dalton Caldwell is looking for, as YC releases new ‘Requests for Startups’

For the first time since 2018, Y Combinator today is publishing its new, multi-category Requests For Startups (often abbreviated to RFS), in which YC outlines the kinds of startups it’s curious about.

Though there have been one-off requests in the interim, those have been aimed at a single sector. However, it was time for a full-fledged refresh, YC group partner Dalton Caldwell told Term Sheet in an exclusive interview.

“We had a lunch conversation where we said, ‘Hey, we should write new ones of these, because we’ve noticed that some of the things people are applying with are a bit repetitive, and now we want to add some spice to the system.”

I asked Caldwell how it’s done—how does YC decide what should (or shouldn’t) make the list? I imagined something quite serious, but this sounds like a pretty informal, chatty process. This time, 12 partners sat in a conference room with Mediterranean takeout, as YC group partner Jared Friedman took out his laptop, and away they went.

The result is an RFS that’s 20 categories long (and was being updated until late yesterday afternoon). Some examples of categories include “applying machine learning to robotics,” “bring manufacturing back to America,” “a way to end cancer,” and “new enterprise resource planning software.” (If someone out there’s looking for an ‘in’ with Caldwell, he’s fired up about the last one.)

This RFS tradition dates back to 2009, but there’s no set time for the RFS to come out—it could be weeks, months, or years between posts. But looking back at that first RFS, it feels to me like a time capsule, a snapshot of what that investors were optimistic about more than 14 years ago, like “Development on Handhelds,” “Future of Journalism,” and “Things Built on Twitter.”

Founders should think of the RFS as the entrepreneur’s version of a creative writing prompt. Caldwell can’t stress this point enough—these categories from YC aren’t meant to be prescriptive. They’re instead meant to be what Caldwell describes as “inspirational jumping off points” or, in some cases, offer a potential founder permission to pursue something that’s not obvious.

"What happens to founders is they feel both implicit and explicit pressure from people they know, to make sure they're working on something that’s fashionable,” said Caldwell. “There’s this self-censorship. Often, when someone gets into YC, they need to change their idea. We’ll say, ‘Wait, you’re not doing the idea that’s right under your nose, where you’re the world’s expert’…Usually, their answer is some version of ‘We didn’t think the idea would be fashionable enough.’”

And, yes, there are AI categories in this new RFS—I press Caldwell on this, since AI is as fashionable as it gets.

“We didn't overthink it,” he said. “AI is a cool, enabling technology and we love it—hooray, now you have to apply it to something. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum.”

One Term Sheet takeaway for prospective YC applicants: Have fun.

“This is a light-hearted, whimsical conversation that we have internally,” Caldwell said. “This isn’t our ten-year analyst report on what we think the major trends are…These are intentionally a little bit idiosyncratic.”

Private equity’s public wins…For PE’s biggest names, this earnings season can be summed up in one phrase: better-than-expected. TPG’s transaction fees hit record highs. And at a skittish time for Wall Street, consider Apollo, where shares are up about 20% year-to-date, or KKR is up about 17% in that period (as of 4:30 PM PT yesterday).

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com